


took the money and your dignity and got the hell out

by wishforwishes



Series: a lack of self-awareness is key [3]
Category: Harry Styles (Musician), Taylor Swift (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, F/M, Kink Shaming, Other, Outing, Public Humiliation, Sex Tapes, Slow Burn, Trans Female Character, Victim Blaming, i'm sorry mr winston, this is the second time i've made poor ben a villain in one of my fics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:27:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27031159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishforwishes/pseuds/wishforwishes
Summary: She couldn't have known it at the time, but several biographies written a century later all attest that after boarding that flight, Taylor Swift never set foot in America again.
Relationships: Harry Styles/Ben Winston, Harry Styles/Taylor Swift
Series: a lack of self-awareness is key [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1517621
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	took the money and your dignity and got the hell out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vondrostes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vondrostes/gifts).



> Well, here we are again. Like a lot of things, my Haylor fic is going to be a little different this year, folks. 
> 
> As you might know, I write a story in this series every year for vondrostes' birthday. A couple of months ago, I came up with the idea of a sex scandal disrupting the Haylor timeline and forcing Taylor and Harry back together.  
> Then, about a week ago, some, uh, let's say similarly horrifying events occurred in another shared fandom of ours, and I sort of lost my taste for finishing this. But I didn't want to abandon my tradition of marking both Terran's birthday and my anniversary of writing fic in this fandom, so! Here's the first chapter, and with it, my hope that the rest will come soon, when the subject hits a little less close to home. 
> 
> (Before reading, please note both the tags and that I have chosen not to archive warnings. Obligatory disclaimer that all of this is fiction and I'm not implying anything about the actual personal lives of any people featured.

The day the video leaked, Taylor knew she had to break up with Joe. 

It was the fall of 2017. She was less than a month out from Reputation's release. Every day leading up to that point, she spent determinedly not thinking about how there was about to be a three year gap between albums for the first time in her career. 

Joe was a first, too, in his own way: the first time since she was a teenager that she'd managed to hide a relationship from prying eyes for longer than five seconds. Taylor hoped — openly wished for, in fact, on some of Reputation's tracks — that this was a sign she'd finally gotten things right. 

Then she woke up to the news that Harry Styles had just become a victim of revenge porn in the worst way. 

By the end of the same day, she had dumped Joe via a single text message, cancelled all her engagements and album promo appearances for the rest of the year, and bought a one-way ticket to London. It was a window seat in business class on a red-eye flight — the earliest flight she could find. At 2AM the next morning, face scrubbed clean of makeup, wearing an over-sized hoodie and jeans and with nothing but a single carry-on bag to her name, she boarded the plane without once looking back. 

She couldn't have known it at the time. But there was a general scholarly consensus centuries later that after boarding that flight, Taylor Swift never set foot in America again. 

* * *

Taylor refused on principle to watch the video, but she was one of very few people in the world with such compunctions. For a society used to gluing their eyes to train wrecks without guilt, it was just too tempting to consume everything about the scandal that they could. 

She was sure that several people on board her flight were spending their time in the air shamelessly taking their phones off airplane mode to get the latest updates on the situation, or to see if any more photos or videos had leaked, or to check if Harry or his team — or the Winstons, Taylor thought with no small amount of disgust — had issued a statement yet. The fact that some people were honestly expecting  _ Harry _ to say something...that some people clearly knew so little, knew  _ jack shit _ about him, and yet were waiting with bated breath for him to put himself on display even more...Taylor wanted to hit something. 

She wanted to punch the fold-out tray table in front of her into a hundred little plastic pieces, and she wanted to yell at the next stewardess who passed by about confiscating everyone's phones, and she wanted to take her own phone off airplane mode so she could send a long message to Ben Winston about all of the creatively violent things she was going to do to his balls if he ever showed his face in public again. 

She did none of these things. She kept placidly still in her seat, not drawing attention to herself, and the flight carried on undisturbed, its passengers unaware of the fact that one of the most famous women in the world was sitting in their midst. 

What Taylor would have seen (what she was easily able to picture, having read an article that summarized everything), had she watched the video, was this:  three minutes of low-quality footage from a cellphone's camera, one-third of the lens obscured by an out-of-focus stack of magazines, and the remaining two-thirds focused on the couple fucking on a bed, several feet away from the camera. 

Despite the distance and the low quality, it was clear from the tattoos that one of the men was Harry. If not for the tattoos, in fact, he would have been virtually unrecognizable. True, his signature long hair was on display, but since it had been shorn off last year, either the video was old or he was wearing a wig. 

The latter being the case wouldn't have surprised the more judgmental people who watched, considering the rest of his look — a school girl's uniform, mussed to high heaven, the shirttails and skirt rucked up just enough to give access to the second man, who was completely naked. Though his face was out of frame, most people had since realized it was Ben Winston. The very married, very straight and straight-laced, brand new father Ben Winston.

If the visual wasn't damning enough, the muffled but still discernible audio included dirty talk that even the Daily Mail probably blushed at momentarily before gleefully transcribing — a lot of 'please' and 'daddy' from Harry and a lot of 'baby girl' and 'good little slut' from Ben. 

Everyone was having a field day with it.  Harry Styles had spent a year outside the public eye after One Direction went on hiatus, but he'd reemerged in 2017 with a solo album to promote and a role in a Christopher Nolan film to attend premieres for. He'd been in the middle of his first solo tour when the video leaked, Taylor knew. She'd even sent him a good luck message before his first show last month. Of course, it was to the phone number he'd asked her to delete after their last disastrous encounter, so she'd never received a reply, and she didn't expect she'd get one now if she checked in on how he was doing. 

This was why she'd gone above his head, burning some bridges with a mutual friend in order to confirm that Harry had gone home to shelter in his London flat after uncharacteristically cancelling the rest of his tour dates. Taylor clenched her teeth in anger, thinking about all of the people implying that it might be a good thing. After all, if someone was so obviously perverted in _that way_ , surely they shouldn't be performing in front of a young and impressionable female audience. It made her almost as sick as the people who were celebrating the 'proof' that they were right all along. That huh, Harry Styles really  _ was _ secretly gay, and wasn't it fun how a meaningless bet finally paid off? 

And all of this was why she was going to ask for forgiveness instead of permission, when she showed up at his door. 

People may have been wasting their lives obsessively speculating and presuming they knew what had gone down, but for Taylor, there was one single thing she was certain of: there was no fucking way Harry had known he was being filmed.

The last conversation she and Harry had, two years ago now, was not a happy one. She had been the one to hurt him, then. Maybe her showing up suddenly, like a bad penny, would only be wounding him more. 

But deep down in the marrow of her bones, Taylor knew that she was the only person who could help Harry through the fallout. That going to him now was more important than the career comeback she had carefully staged over the last months. Maybe this was _why_ she had pulled a disappearing act last year — not to avoid her own drama but in subconscious preparation for facing Harry head on. 

In another world she would have railed against the idea that her destiny was tied to helping a man salvage his career. But in that other world, an eighteen-year-old Harry Styles never trembled in a hotel room and asked her to be the first person to eat him out. In that world, a twenty-one-year old Harry Styles never walked back into and back out of her life in the space of an hour, wearing a lilac dress and leaving an unsaid confession in his wake. In that world, she never questioned for an instant if Harry Styles was a man in the first place. 

In some other world, where Harry had trusted her less, none of those things would have happened. But there was also a world — a future that just maybe, Taylor could claw her way into — where Harry trusted her _more_. Trusted her enough to unstick that confession from his throat, to come to her with his desires instead of to some man who would eventually betray him. 

The plane's tinny overheard speakers switched on, disrupting her introspection. With a much too cheerful voice for the middle of the night, the pilot announced they were about to head through some turbulence, but not to worry. 

Things would be steady again soon enough. 


End file.
